This blog is affiliated with a course at the School of Journalism & Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I'll try to use it to share relevant news and information with the class, and anyone else who's interested.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Dish Makes Bid for Sprint

Dish Network has put forward a bid to acquire Sprint Nextel for $25.5 billion, providing them entry into telecommunications markets - and mobile broadband in particular. It also provides the potential to offer the combination of multichannel TV, broadband data, and mobile services that competitors AT&T and Verizon provides.

Dish, and fellow DBS operator DirecTV, have largely been limited to providing TV service in an increasingly converged digital marketplace. They've made deals with other telecomm operators to offer bundled service packages in competition with cable and cable telco operators, but these efforts have become problematic as partners have increasingly turned into competitors. Analysts suggest that the acquisition of Sprint would provide Dish with their own telecomm service, significantly grow their ability to provide digital bandwidth in package deals, and provide new business opportunities to create systems that could give consumers access to media, content, and communication services across a number of devices. And placing them in a better competitive position with rivals AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.

Consumers would be happy with the Sprint purchase, says Dish. "Someone who gives you more than 2 [gigabytes] for the same money, that's attractive," said Thomas Cullen, Dish executive vp of corporate development of Dish. "Nobody is going to have a bigger pipe than Dish-Sprint." The proposed deal could give customers 50 gigabytes.

The deal would also provide Dish with additional leverage over TV content providers, and position it for future growth.

Specifically Dish would gain in the one area many media executives -- traditional, digital, and otherwise -- know is coming: an aggressive rise of all media on mobile platforms.

In addition, rumors are starting to spread about a possible deal between Dish, with its Hopper service, and broadcast redistributor Aereo (as if the traditional TV networks and content producers weren't already fretting about those technologies and services). It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.